


Remember Me

by stupidmuse_hatesme



Series: howling desert of my mind [1]
Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Angst, Djinni, M/M, Magic, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-11
Updated: 2011-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stupidmuse_hatesme/pseuds/stupidmuse_hatesme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Before John went to Afghanistan, John didn't believe in djinni. In fact, he had no idea what they even were.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt can be found [HERE](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com5950.html?thread=26177086#t26177086) And yes, I filled the same prompt twice >.
> 
> I actually wrote this at the same time as "Dandelion Wishes" (my other fill), but I figured that since they were following the (relatively) same topic, I would put some time in between their posts :) The main difference between these two, however, is that while the last Sherlock was suspiciously similar to Genie from Disney's Aladdin, I modeled _this_ Sherlock off of the djinn who appears (very briefly) in _American Gods_. So I suppose this one is a bit more serious. Less humor and all that. Definitely _not_ fluffy. I give credit to my beta lizzlie who talked me out of my unfortunate decision to make John and Harry into Victorian orphans (dialogue-wise). But I take all the credit for whatever mistakes I made with their dialogue _after_ she talked me out of that! ;)

Before John went to Afghanistan, John didn't believe in djinni. In fact, he had no idea what they even were. He had been a very level-headed child who played at wrapping bandages on the legs of neighborhood dogs rather than playing cowboys and Indians or magic.

He usually played alone except for when Harry interrupted his “free clinics” and dragged him to the park to do normal things.

John had never heard of djinni, but that didn't mean that he had never met one.

When he was nine and Harry had interrupted him lecturing a local cat on how to properly treat an injured paw to drag him to the park, John found an injured crow.

“Harry, belt up. I hear something.”

“Whatcha on about, you twit?”

“Ssh!”

The two children paused on the edge of the wood that ringed around the play park and listened.

A pained squawking rang out.

John's eyes sharpened like a hound on the hunt and he straightened up rigidly. “Something's hurt.”

“John, don't you even think about it. You're off your trolley! Mum'll have my guts for garters if you get bit.”

The little blond boy whipped his head around and pinned his older sister with a pleading stare.

“Harry,” he whined. “It's _hurt._ ”

The bird called out again, but before Harry could even open her mouth in permission, or lack thereof, John had taken off running.

His short and stocky legs had to move quickly to pound his feet along the path. He was a fast runner, but he had to be faster: _something was hurt._

 _“Caw!”_

John veered off the path, low-lying blackberry vines catching at him and tearing the skin at his ankles. He charged through the sharp brambles and pushed through needled branches into a small grove.

A crow lay in the middle of it, wing bent at a sharp angle from its body.

“Oh!” John cried out. He should have hesitated--the worst injuries he had treated were paper cuts on people and thorns in foot pads of animals. He instinctively knew that a broken wing was much worse. He stood panting at the edge of the clearing, springy moss beneath his feet, but couldn't listen to the pained and raspy cries for long. Glancing about, he fetched branches from the ground and broke them into several small pieces, the snapping sounds hard to hear over the crow. Then he fumbled medical tape from his trouser pocket. After a moment, he changed his mind and dropped it so that he could drag his handkerchief from his breast pocket.

When he began to rip it, the crow twitched and rolled a little bit, squawking more loudly.

“John!” He heard Harry yell from far away. “John!”

The little boy dropped to his knees, staining his brown corduroys on the moss immediately, and crawled to the crow with his supplies gripped desperately in his hands.

The crow got louder the closer he came so he took up a low and soothing murmur.

“Hey, there ducky. That's some break you got there. I can fix that easy peasy. You just gotta be quiet for me'n not bite me or nothin'! I'll be a doctor one day, so you can trust me. Harry's beastly, but I think I'm all right. You got nothin' to worry about.”

Surprisingly, as John inched closer and continued to talk, the crow collapsed, exhausted, and only let out pathetic little rasping cries.

When John released the twigs and touched the bird with his left hand, the bird only shuddered.

“All right?” he asked it. “If you sit up I'll make everything better. Just a mo, is all.”

John let go of the tattered hanky as well so that he could place a small hand on the crow's back and manipulate the crow's wings. He held it gently and pushed the crow onto its feet, urging it to sit so that he could set the wing. The crow sat, shivering, and watched him with a shiny eye that seemed suspicious and wary. His nimble little fingers prodded until he found the break and swiftly straightened it, laying a branch along the slender bone.

“Caw!”

Hurriedly, John tied two pieces of his hanky around the end segment of the wing where the break was. As soon as he could, he folded the wing to the bird's back then wrapped his small hands as far around the bird as he could, still murmuring reassuringly.

“You can't fly for a while,” he said sadly. “And I can't have pets, but I'd take you home if I could.”

The bird watched him steadily as he used the last of the cloth to bind both wings to the crow's back. The bird's eye was bright with fire rather than glazed with pain.

“Smart bird,” John murmured, tying off the last knots and withdrawing his hands.

“John?” Harry called out, sounding closer.

The bird hopped away from him then turned back, cocking his head in contemplation.

“I don't grant wishes,” the bird croaked.

“What?” John gasped, astonished.

“I don't grant wishes,” the crow blinked very slowly. “But I will remember you.”

“John?”

John turned to look behind him, calling out, “I'm here, Harry,” then looked back.

The bird had hopped away.

Harry broke through the brush. “You twat,” she scolded. “I hope you did get bit, running off like that.”

A single black feather lay on the ground.

* * *

“They have eyes of fire,” an Afghani doctor told him. “Some call them ifrit, or demon. Other call them djinn. Djinni is more than one.”

John was helping in a poor village, assisting dusty and weary doctors with amputees and orphans covered in sores and puss. But although the stench of sickness rose in the air, John was very interested in the other doctor's stories.

“Like Genie?” John asked, deftly bandaging a young boy's oozing leg.

The olive skinned doctor shook his head. “Nothing like it. They don't grant wishes, our djinni. But they remember.”

“They remember?”

“How you say...memory like elephant. Never forget bad or good.”

“Is this bad?”

“Very bad. Stay away from djinni. You do not want their favours. You help them they help you, but that help not always good. They are tricksters.”

“Are they like gods?” John asked.

“Oh, no. They are djinni.”

Once John was informed, he felt like he saw strange things everywhere. If he wasn't such a steady man, occasionally seeing men with fire burning in their eyes would have set him off balance or made him paranoid. They might have even made him feel like he was going crazy.

But he took it all in stride. He saw a hawk become a man, but said nothing. He saw plenty of strange people while at war, but let all of them fade into his memory. But after speaking to the other doctor, he carefully touched no man with burning eyes more than necessary and gave his name to none of them.

He did not wish to earn a djinn's favor if it was to be a dubious one.

But for all he avoided them, they seemed to be everywhere. Some spoke, some did not. They were soldiers and villagers and children and they all watched John with burning eyes.

 _“They remember.”_

“You have a token,” one said, on the threshold of death as John tried to ease his pain.

“Pardon?” John asked.

“You take pains to separate yourself from us,” the ifrit confided, when he should have been gasping his last breath. “Not many can see us unless they believe. Do you believe?”

“I can see your eyes,” John commented mildly, injecting a painkiller into the I.V.. “Hard not to believe in something I can see.”

“Most do not see. You do. You fear, as well. You fear being marked by one of us.”

“Only sensible,” John said conversationally, “to avoid any favours I do not want.”

“You are too late for that,” the djinn told him before his breath rattled out of his lungs and the fire left his eyes.

John remembered the feather lodged in his breast pocket, still sleek despite the years, and wondered.

 _“I will remember you.”_

* * *

John was lucky, they told him. He didn't feel so lucky when he woke up in hospital with a bullet hole through his shoulder, a fever lurking at the edge of his perception, and the beginning of a tremor in his dominant left hand that could pose trouble for him in the future.

The bullet had left a star-burst scar on his shoulder that splashed across his torn muscles and reminded him every day of the first thing the doctor had told him when his fever from the infection had finally begun to ebb.

“It nearly hit your heart,” John had been told. “Only a little lower, and you wouldn't be here anymore.”

When he was conscious enough to wonder about it, he asked about the feather that had been in his pocket. He had the vague thought that if the bullet had missed his heart it had missed his breast pocket as well. Neither the doctors nor the nurses had seen it, but a day after he had awoken he found it in the drawer of the table next to his bed.

He told himself that it must have been there all along and he had only missed it.

* * *

John had bigger things to worry about than a magically appearing feather. He had to worry about therapy (thanks to being injured), physical therapy to regain motion in his arm, and fully fighting off the fever that dogged him for weeks. He had to concern himself with the details about how long it would take him to be fighting ready again, and what he needed to do to get to that point.

Then the doctor told him that the tremor in his hand was permanent and that he'd never regain full movement of his left shoulder. That even though he hadn't been injured on his right leg, his brain certainly thought so. He learned how to use a cane, but he didn't like it. He learned not to be disappointed with his slow progress. He played along with the therapist he spoke with in hospital and let him think he was truly opening up to him.

Then he was informed that he was invalided and would be sent home.

What they didn't understand was that London, England for that matter, was no longer his home. His mates weren't there, the action wasn't there, his _job_ wasn't there. They were sending him away was what they were doing.

All he had left was the black crow feather that he had kept for so many years. So when he finally left hospital for London in gifted clothes from his sister, the only personal effects he had were his new phone, a well-loved laptop, his nicked revolver, and the feather.

He told himself that wasn't pathetic. He didn't believe that lie either.

The parts of London they always showed on the telly were clean and bright, but that wasn't really what the city was like, not anywhere away from The City itself. John wouldn't have loved London if it didn't have the grotty bits.

His therapist told him that he feared the war and needed to acclimatize to real life, to normality. He knew that was not true. He missed Afghanistan. He missed the dust and the circling vultures and the djinni that followed him with burning eyes. He missed the creatures and spirits he could see out in the desert whenever he chose to look.

John looked often.

London had them too. Though there weren't as many djinni, and nothing else that seemed familiar to him--they just didn't seem _right_.

Sometimes a cat, always different, followed him around with eerily intelligent eyes before running off into an alley and disappearing. Once he swore he saw a man with the head of a dog digging in a skip behind a restaurant for food. When he looked again, it was just a man with sharp features and shaggy black hair.

He saw these strange people everywhere--in cabs, in restaurants, in the streets.

No one else seemed to notice them, but sometimes, they noticed him.

“You've carried this burden for many years,” a sinuous and dark-skinned woman with amber eyes and sharp teeth once said as she stepped around John's cane and pressed a manicured hand to the chest pocket John kept his crow feather in. “Won't you give it to me for a while?”

With a thin smile he shook his head and watched her prowl away.

“What _are_ you,” a solemn boy with soul deep eyes asked him one day. Despite the fact that the boy was shoeless and they were both standing on a crowded sidewalk, the crowds only bumped and looked at John.

All of the pedestrians slid around the boy like he was there, but they didn't see him.

“I can't tell what you are,” the boy said plaintively.

John gripped his cane tightly and gritted his teeth as well. “I'm a doctor. Or, I was.”

“But what are you?”

“No one,” he said. “I'm no one.”

“But you shine so brightly,” the boy said earnestly from under his shaggy mop of brown hair. His skin was a cinnamon brown but his eyes were not lit with fire: they were empty of all light. “Why do you shine? You aren't one of us.”

“No,” John said. “I'm not.”

He walked away from the boy, resting heavily on his cane as he limped back to his flat, and only looked back once. The boy stood adrift in the crowd of rushing people and, from the distance, John fancied he could hear, “But how you _shine_ ”

John didn't know why he fascinated them, and he didn't know if there really was an ifrit or djinn out there who remembered him. He only knew that he was a doctor who couldn't perform surgery and a man who had a limp that wasn't real.

In his dreams he heard the whistle and howl of the desert wind.

* * *

John accessed his bank card on the internet and frowned at the pitiful amount still in his account. It wouldn't be enough for more than cans of soup and some tea, perhaps, but it was all he had for the rest of the month. He refreshed the balance, hoping it would change, but it didn't. With a sigh, he shut his laptop and dumped it into his desk drawer before sliding it shut.

He limped out of his flat and left the cramped room behind him for the shops.

He had a depressingly light plastic bag swinging from his fingertips when he left Tescos and limped back to his flat.

“Pardon me,” a deep voice sounded from what appeared to be a pile of blankets against a skip in an alley.

John paused on the sidewalk, staring into the darkness, and adjusted his grip on his cane so that he could swing it if he needed to. “Yes?” he answered awkwardly.

“As a fellow, I wonder if you would trade with me for some information.”

“A fellow?” John repeated, narrowing his eyes in suspicion. “You must be mistaking me for someone else.”

“I don't believe so,” the blankets said, shifting to the ground as a man I an impeccable suit stood from beneath them. “One of the normals wouldn't shine like you.” His long and lanky limbs unfolded as he stood and his eyes burned in the darkness.

The fire they burned with was blue.

“You're a djinn,” John said, standing straight and gripping his cane tightly.

The djinn strode closer. “And you,” he observed in his deep and low voice, “are not.”

“No. And I have nothing you would want.”

“You have met a djinn,” he noted, curly black hair swinging around his face and framing his glowing eyes. His sharp features were birdlike and this detail was accentuated when the man stood still and tilted his head while gazing at John.

“I've seen many. They're best let alone,” John replied, readying himself to leave.

“I remember you,” the djinn rumbled. “It was long ago for you, but only yesterday.”

 _“They remember._

“I'm afraid not,” John said as he backed up a step. “I have never met you before.”

“Have you ever been told that you shine?”

“All the time,” John snapped. “Before the war I saw none of you. I didn't see gods in the trash and djinni driving cabs. Now they stare at me and marvel. I'm not a freak show!”

The djinn stepped closer, intruding on John's space until the shorter man took another involuntary step back.

“No,” his voice purred with deep amusement. “You're a doctor.”

“Why don't any of you just leave me alone?”

“I don't grant wishes, but I remember, doctor.”

John suddenly recalled the black feather in his pocket and how he received it and his eyes widened in realization.

 _“You fear being marked by one of us. You are too late for that.”_

John's cane hit the ground with a clatter as he bolted. In the alley, cans of soup rolled from a flimsy plastic bag abandoned on the pavement. The djinn stood, blue eyes burning in the darkness as the doctor's steps pounded away. The djinn turned and vanished. A moment later, a crow flapped out of the alley and flew away.

* * *

Anxious and hungry, John sat on the hard bed in his tiny flat without the lights on. It was dark in the little box but he still saw the flash of a shadow across the window before a beak clacked against the glass. With a sigh, he stood and walked to the window. The crow was perched on the fire escape and John could see his eyes glinting in the darkness.

John opened the window.

The crow outside became a man inside--a lanky figure looming behind the doctor--so John closed the window. John kept his back to the djinn and clutched the window sill tightly.

“You remember me,” John said. It wasn't a question.

“You carry my feather. Has it done you well?”

“If it has, you owe me nothing. If it hasn't, you still owe me nothing.”

The djinn stepped close enough behind John that the doctor fancied he could feel the body heat burning him from back to thighs.

“A favor from a djinn is nothing to sniff at. A favor such as the one I owe you is one that any other person would gladly snatch up.”

“You don't grant wishes,” John said, involuntarily leaning back towards the burning heat behind him. His hands loosened their grip on the window sill.

“No,” the djinn said, slotting his body against John's and ghosting his hot breath across the nape of John's neck. “I do not.” After a moment, he spoke again. “What do you want, John,” the djinn whispered into his prickling skin, long arms insinuating themselves around the smaller man's waist.

“You know my name,” the doctor murmured, hands falling from the sill to his sides.

The djinn did not answer.

“Your name,” John said finally. “ All I will ask for is your name.”

“Names have great power,” the djinn chided in a warm and humored voice.

“Is it an equal gift to the one I granted you?”

The djinn paused, then nosed at John's neck and rumbled, “Sherlock Holmes.”

That's what John heard, but under the solemn thrum he thought he heard something else, something with more syllables, in a distant and strange language that John didn't recognize.

“Sherlock,” John said, tongue heavy and unwilling. “Sherlock.”


End file.
